Denmark's corporate websites keep pace with European peers but struggle on UX

 By Chris Henson

Denmark's corporate websites are relatively well-stocked with key information, and their media services are among the best in Europe. More can be done to help their stakeholders to access this content, though, as the Danish user experience is far from seamless.

In this year's Webranking season we reviewed the corporate websites of the largest 20 Danish companies by market cap. Danish sites are performing on a relatively similar level to last year, which is in line with the average across Europe. The Danish average has decreased for the second consecutive year, though, to 43.9 points (out of 100). As such, there is some work to be done to close the widening communication gap with stakeholders. An area to start the recovery is improving the user experience of the sites, as the navigation through the content structure can be tricky and the internal search engines aren't doing enough to help out. Danish press sections are performing notably well, though, and are a highlight of their corporate communications this year.

An efficient service for journalists

The Press section is one of the best areas of Danish communication, with the companies delivering half of what stakeholders such as business journalists expect to find in this section. Considering the bar for what stakeholders want is high, 50% is a reasonable starting point albeit with plenty of room for growth, and it outstrips the European average by 6%. Media contact information is a particularly strong aspect of this, with Danish websites containing on average 72% of the necessary contact details - the third highest amount on the continent. Companies almost always present at least one personal media contact, although more could be done to provide a general contact too, for queries that might arrive out-of-hours or when a personal contact is away.

One company that presents their media contacts in a decent level of detail is Chr. Hansen. They have pictures, titles, personal emails and telephone numbers for four of their contacts, so while there's no general contact details for the whole team, they do provide an extensive amount of options for any enquiry.

Press release archives are the section's Achilles heel

To start fulfilling the other half of stakeholders' needs for this website section, Danish press release archives could do with further attention. In particular, they tend to lack filter functions that can help a user to quickly find the information they seek. Only 1 in 4 press archives have a search engine to filter results by keywords, just 1 in 5 give the option to filter releases by months, and even fewer offer the possibility to refine the releases by topics. Carlsberg are one of the top-scorers in Europe for this criteria, and are a good example for their Danish peers as a result. Their Latest News can be categorised within an exact date range of publication, sorted by topics, and narrowed down using the search bar. They also have a Company Announcements page in the Investor Relations containing financially-sensitive releases, with similar filters in place to easily direct stakeholders to the content they seek.

Sub-par user experience lets Danish websites down

One area where Danish companies clearly trail the European average is the general functionality of their sites. When comparing the 20 Danish companies with the 20 largest companies from 14 of the ranked European countries, Danish websites are bottom of the pile for the ease of their site navigation as well as the quality of their internal search engines - both of which feed into the overall user experience. We've written about some of the pitfalls companies fall into and how they can improve, and Danish companies could take heed as currently only 25% of their corporate sites have a content structure which makes it easy to navigate to relevant sections and pages. Part of the navigation complexity could stem from Danish corporate sites tending to be merged on the same platform as their consumer sites. This is not always a problem, but if a good solution hasn't been found for the navigation it can result in a bloated menu with too many options.

Danish internal search engines draw parallels with their press release archives, as there's a general lack of functionality built in to help users hone in on relevant results. Only a small percentage contain a spellchecker, and far less than half provide filters so the search can be narrowed down by the topic of each result or the format of each object (e.g. PDF, web page, news item). The devil's in the details, and while Danish companies apply broad brushstrokes, more refinement is required to truly hit the mark for ever-more expectant stakeholders.

The Danish winners and the biggest climber

Following up on last year's triumph, the Danish winner of Webranking for the second year running is Chr. Hansen. While their score has slightly dropped in line with the overall trend this year, they're still far ahead of their Danish counterparts. Nordea finishes in 2nd place this year, ascending from 4th place last year. The third spot on the podium also happens to be this year's best climber. Vestas Wind Systems have gained 5.2 points since last year, moving them up from 7th to 3rd place.

See the full Denmark results